American Dream

by Jason DeParle

  “You can cut them off ”: Rep. Rick Santorum at press conference, Nov. 10, 1993.

  115 Rector was raised: Interview with Robert Rector.Jacuzzis: DeParle, The Washington Monthly (July/Aug. 1991): 51-54.

  “way to ‘end welfare’ ”: Rep. Jim Talent, press release, April 27, 1994.

  116 “realm of politics”: Memo from William Bennett, Jack Kemp, and Vin Weber, Empower America, April 13, 1994.the “stench”: DeParle, NYT, May 12, 1994.

  “I am impelled”: Henry Aaron to Ellwood, Jan. 14, 1994.

  117 “White House Seeks”: DeParle, NYT, Jan. 5, 1994.“boob bait”: Deborah Orin and Christopher Ruddy, New York Post, Jan. 7, 1994. While Moynihan’s erratic behavior had many causes, his consumption of alcohol (an intermittent topic of conversation among his admirers and his critics) may have been among them. The night he told me “I talk too much,” I had reached him at home, where he sounded like he’d been drinking.

  “Many are willing”: Ellwood, Poor Support, 241.

  “If you don’t put money”: Clinton speech in Jonesboro, Georgia, Sept. 9, 1992.

  118 “things so much closer”: Interview with Bruce Reed.This was a bind: For details on the attempt to finance the Clinton plan, see author’s 1994 articles in the NYT on Feb. 13, 22, and 25; March 3, 10, 21, and 23; April 5; May 9, 16, and 19; and July 15.

  “There simply is no money”: Ellwood, “From Social Science to Social Policy,” lecture, Jan. 9, 1996, 1.

  “Tim Valentine problem”: Interviews with Bruce Reed and David Ellwood.

  119 glassy-eyed look: Robert Reich, Locked in the Cabinet (New York: Knopf, 1997), 156.“the most negative”: DeParle, NYT, May 9, 1994.

  8 percent: DeParle, NYT, June 15, 1994.

  slow the rate of growth: CBO, “The Administration’s Welfare Reform Proposals,” Dec. 1994, 10.

  120 Rector made his case: Robert Rector, “Welfare Reform, Dependency Reduction, and Labor Market Entry,” Journal of Labor Research 14, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 283-97.

  120 more rigorous studies: The leading study of work (as opposed to education or job-search) programs was Thomas Brock, David Butler, and - David Long, “Unpaid Work Experience for Welfare Recipients: Findings and Lessons from MDRC Research,” MDRC, Sept. 1993. It examined programs in San Diego, Chicago, and West Virginia and concluded, “It is not clear from the limited evidence that unpaid work experience leads to reductions in welfare receipt or welfare payments,” 3.“self-limiting expertise”: Interview with John Tapogna.

  “there go the Wright brothers”: Interview with Robert Rector.

  $5 billion short: CBO, “The Administration’s Welfare Reform Proposals,” Dec. 1994, 2.

  121 Clinton on both sides: “something at the end of the road,” Clinton remarks in Kansas City, June 14, 1994, PPP-1994, vol. 1, 1078; “You’re not eligible,” Clinton exchange with reporters, June 15, 1994, PPP-1994, vol. 1, 1083.“I wasn’t pleased”: Ben Wattenberg, New York Post, Nov. 3, 1995.

  action was deferred: Clinton grasped the point that the future impact of a welfare bill was hard to predict, cautioning the cabinet on March 22, 1994, that “things depend entirely on how the welfare bureaucracy responds.” Interview with Bruce Reed.

  “hope and structure”: Clinton remarks in Kansas City, June 14, 1994.

  122 turned Ellwood into a piñata: DeParle, NYT, July 31, 1994.

  7. REDEFINING COMPASSION: WASHINGTON, 1995123 “viciously hateful,” “totally sick”: DeParle, NYTM, Jan. 28, 1996, 48.declined Clinton’s call: Maureen Dowd, NYT, Nov. 10, 1994.

  “the real Reagan revolution”: Memo from Ron Haskins to Bill Archer, Nov. 14, 1994.

  124 “it was too radical”: Interview with Newt Gingrich.

  125 “couldn’t spell AFDC”: Interview with Ron Haskins.“ ‘We’re not talking theory’ ”: Interview with Newt Gingrich.

  would have lost $11 billion: From 1989 through 1993, the federal government spent $63 billion on AFDC; had spending been frozen in 1988, the five-year total would have been $52 billion; 1996 Green Book, 459. One reason Republicans had dismissed block grants the previous year, Rep. E. Clay Shaw Jr. told me, was that “we were afraid the governors would fight us.” As governor in 1988, Bill Clinton opposed them. (See text, p. 99.)

  “resist publicly”: Memo from Henick to Haley Barbour, Nov. 11, 1994.

  “burdensome unfunded mandate”: George A. Voinovich, “The Need for a New Federalism: A State-Federal Legislative Agenda for the 104th Congress” (paper circulated at Republican Governors Association, Nov. 1994), 7.

  126 “I couldn’t understand”: Interview with Ari Fleischer.“come in on bended knee”: A participant’s notes from meeting with Thompson, Dec. 8, 1994.

  meeting of Republican Governors: Interviews with Sheila Burke, Don Fierce, Chris Henick, Gerald Miller, LeAnne Redick, and others on background.

  “spleen-venting”: Memo from Chris Henick to Haley Barbour and others, Oct. 4, 1994.

  “We are willing to accept”: Letter from Engler, Weld, and Thompson to Rep. Clay Shaw, Dec. 12, 1994.

  127 child welfare systems: Memo from Ray Scheppach, National Governors Association, to governors Thompson, Engler, and others, April 7, 1995.average state had just 13 percent: 1996 Green Book, 427.

  Rector feeling bilious: “panhandlers”: Rector, National Review, April 17, 1995; “sluggards,” editorial, National Review, Feb. 6, 1995; “obstacles,” Judith Havemann, WP, Feb. 19, 1995.

  “always been irritating”: Interview with Newt Gingrich.

  “starve children”: Dan Balz, WP, Jan. 9, 1995.

  “A major embarrassment”: Charleston Gazette, Feb. 14, 1995.

  128 twenty states wouldn’t have to run a work program: Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Program: Fourth Annual Report to Congress, May 2002, table 3:1:a.Rector hatched the idea: Interviews with Robert Rector and Ron Haskins.

  129 “You cannot sustain”: Interview with Newt Gingrich.$65 billion cut: Sharon Parrott, “Cash Assistance and Related Provisions in the Personal Responsibility Act,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, April 6, 1995, 3.

  130 Democrats reacted: “Make Americans Hungry,” Rep. Harold Volkmer in CQ, March 11, 1995, 758; Rep. Major Owens in Robert Pear, NYT, March 23, 1995; Rep. John Lewis in Mary McGrory, WP, April 2, 1995.“not trying to get people entitled”: Robert Pear, NYT, March 9, 1995. The word does have unfortunate connotations, suggesting entitlements are by nature permissive. But in this context, “entitlement” refers only to the funding structure. A strict work program that cuts off recipients who fail to work could still be an entitlement, as long as those who do follow the rules are guaranteed the aid. The conflict between the word’s formal and informal meanings was a source of constant confusion.

  131 The less we spend: GOP senator Phil Gramm put on a particularly bald display of the New Compassion while campaigning before the Iowa caucuses in 1996. Around Washington, the Texan liked to say he was so tough he kept his heart in a jar, but when I asked why he wanted to end welfare, he said of recipients: “Because ahh luvvvv ’em!”

  131 “Orwellian perversion”: Interview with Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

  132 “I thought we’d be in more trouble”: Interview with Gingrich.generous people have stopped: Murray, Losing Ground, p. 236.

  Shechtman: DeParle, NYTM, Jan. 28, 1996.

  thirteen “power phrases,” “Rep. Dunn”: The Wirthlin Group, “Pulseline Research on Welfare Reform Conducted on Behalf of the Republican National Committee & the National Republican Congressional Committee,” March 1995, 3, 8.

  dystopian future: The Bell Curve (coauthored with Richard Herrnstein) also marked a shift in Murray’s treatment of race. When he first proposed ending welfare in Losing Ground, Murray took pains to stress his color-blind views. “It makes no difference whether Harold is white or black,” he wrote, in his famous parable about the welfare couple Harold and Phyllis (p. 162). The main furor in The Bell Curve (New York: Free Press, 1994), however, was its stress on black-white
differences in intelligence scores and especially his speculation about whether a genetic element was in play.

  list of horrifying stories: Dick Armey, “Welfare Reform Debate Information,” March 16, 1995.

  133 alligators and wolves: 104th Cong., 1st sess., Cong. Rec. 141 (March 24, 1995): H 3766 (alligators), H 3722 (wolves).After decades of predictable: Ford and Shaw traded barbs on Feb. 15, 1995, in the Ways and Means subcommittee on welfare.

  134 “Newt Gingrich believed”: Interview with Bill Clinton, Jan. 30, 2004.Shays told his wife: Interview with Christopher Shays.

  “My hero is Newt Gingrich”: Christopher Shays press conference, Nov. 17, 1995.

  135 “fast-forward”: Dick Morris, Behind the Oval Office: Getting Reelected Against All Odds (1997; repr., Los Angeles: Renaissance Books), 37.“get welfare off ”: Interview with Doug Schoen.

  “strategic mistake”: Mickey Kaus, “They Blew It,” The New Republic, Dec. 5, 1994.

  “I should have done welfare”: Joe Klein, The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton (New York: Doubleday, 2002), 81.

  “It wasn’t really until the summer”: Interview with Dick Morris.

  “liberate” the poor: Clinton State of the Union Address, Jan. 24, 1995, PPP-1995, vol. 1, 79; remarks at White House, Jan. 28, 1995, PPP-1995, vol. 1, 108; remarks at Democratic Governors Association dinner, Jan. 30, 1995, PPP-1995, vol. 1, 123.

  Lillie Harden: Clinton remarks to National Association of Counties, March 7, 1995, PPP-1995, vol. 1, 321.

  “I still hope it will be the basis”: Clinton remarks to NACO, March 7, 1995, PPP-1995, vol. 1, 317.

  136 “I wasn’t pleased”: New York Post, Nov. 3, 1995.

  136 “I loved block grants”: Clinton remarks to Florida Legislature, March 30, 1995, PPP-1995, vol. 1, 422.“It is not fair”: Ibid., p. 423.

  If “these people can’t find jobs”: Clinton radio address, April 8, 1995, PPP-1995, vol. 1, 492.

  praised bills without last-resort jobs: Clinton radio address, Sept. 16, 1995, PPP-1995, vol. 1, 1305.

  answer “yes and no”: Talking Points on Welfare Reform, Nov. 13, 1995, author’s files.

  Modified Madman: Interview with Bruce Reed.

  didn’t think the entitlement meant much: Interviews with Dick Morris, Bruce Reed, and Bill Clinton, who told me, “I didn’t have a problem with block-granting to the states because we had already de facto done that” given the wide variation in state benefit levels; Jan. 30, 2004.

  obscure tool of child support: Clinton radio address, March 18, 1995, PPP-1995, vol. 1, 373.

  polled well: Interview with administration official on background.

  “In no time in recent”: Donna E. Shalala, Memorandum to the President, Jan. 19, 1995. Labor Secretary Robert Reich, an opponent of the bill, was another cabinet member impatient with Clinton’s stance. “The big strategic error was to let things drift initially and not to signal what was acceptable and what wasn’t,” he told me. “Everything from that point on was about reducing the abomination.”

  137 “only from the right”: Dick Morris memo to Bill Clinton, Feb. 17, 1995, excerpted in Morris, Behind the Oval Office, 353.Panetta: Interview with Leon Panetta.

  moment of subtle revelation: Reuters, May 23, 1995; interview with Ginny Terzano.

  8. THE ELUSIVE PRESIDENT: WASHINGTON, 1995-1996138 Moynihan assured: In an interview, Paul Offner, Moynihan’s main welfare aide, said: “Dole and Packwood were probably his two closest friends on the Finance Committee. He thought there was no way in the world Dole was going to go along with this stuff. I think Moynihan was really blind-sided by those guys, whom he had such respect for, that they would fall in behind Gingrich. . . . They shut him out just as tight as could be.”affection Dole felt for the governors: Unlike Clinton, who portrayed his politicking as the essence of high-mindedness, Dole had an endearing habit of broadcasting his ulterior motives. He boasted his plan had the support of governors in New Hampshire, Iowa, and Arizona—“to name a few primary states.” CQ, Aug. 12, 1995, 2444.

  139 only speech published: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “Congress Builds a Coffin,” The New York Review of Books, Jan. 11, 1996.“Nothing I did connected”: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Miles to Go: A Personal History of Social Policy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 36.

  drove other problems: Moynihan wrote, “From the wild Irish slums of the 19th-century Eastern Seaboard to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history: A community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any rational expectations about the future—that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, disorder—most particularly the furious, unrestrained lashing out at the whole social structure—that is not only to be expected; it is very near to inevitable.” (America, Sept. 18, 1965, and repeated in America, Sept. 14, 1991)

  “To ask questions”: Mickey Kaus, a trenchant Moynihan observer, cites this quote in a book review in The Washington Monthly, Sept. 1986. The original is from Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Family and Nation (1986; repr., New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1987), 187.

  “grown more perplexed”: 104th Cong., 1st sess., Cong. Rec. 141 (Dec. 21, 1995): S 19089.

  gloom about the welfare poor: “paupers,” Moynihan, letter to the editor, NYT, Dec. 26, 1991; “failed persons,” Mickey Kaus, NYT, Nov. 19, 1996. At times, Moynihan wondered aloud whether the underclass had a biological basis in the falling age of female puberty. “You could find yourself talking about speciation here,” he said in Senate hearing, a comment at once opaque and degrading (Senate Finance Committee, July 13, 1994). Once when an aide referred to welfare “clients,” Moynihan flew into a rage: Clients pay and command respect! These are recipients; they take what they get.

  140 “I just do”: Robin Toner, NYT, June 18, 1995.ragged childhood: Moynihan made his hard-knocks past part of his political persona, but one knock he rarely mentioned was his own family’s stay on welfare. His father abandoned the family when he was ten, and his mother went on public aid before seeking refuge in a brief, unhappy second marriage to a well-to-do man. As a 1994 profile in Vanity Fair reported: “He doesn’t talk about what happened. Even his daughter says she knows only the sketchiest outlines of the story.” Elise O’Shaughnessy, VF, May 1994; see also Douglas Schoen, Pat: A Biography of Daniel Patrick Moynihan (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 10-11.

  “I write to plead”: Letter from Offner to Moynihan, April 21, 1995.

  “ruinous”: Judith Havemann and John Harris, WP, June 15, 1995.

  141 “filibuster it”: Robert Pear, NYT, June 16, 1991.bill’s preamble: DeParle, NYTM, Nov. 12, 1995, 35.

  142 “These moves”: Interview with Robert Rector.Senate allies: Faircloth, Judith Havemann, and John Harris in WP, June 15, 1995; Ashcroft in Robert Pear, NYT, Aug. 20, 1995; Gramm on CBS, Face the Nation, Aug. 6, 1995.

  “jump ball”: CQ, Aug. 12, 1995, 2444.

  143 “sleeping on grates”: 104th Cong., 1st sess., Cong. Rec. 141 (Sept. 6, 1995): S 12705.“I cannot believe”: Clinton news conference, Aug. 10, 1995, PPP-1995, vol. 2, 1245.

  “[b]rag about cuts”: Morris, Behind the Oval Office, 467. Morris told me he had been polling to see what message might win public support for a veto and found none.

  Democrats demanded $3 billion: Interviews with Grace Reef, Laurie Rubiner, Cynthia Rice, and Helen Blank.

  Dole, Dodd: In 104th Cong., 1st sess., Cong. Rec. 141 (Sept. 14, 1995): S 13581.

  144 “wisdom and courage”: Clinton radio address, Sept. 16, 1995, PPP-1995, vol. 2, 1366.high fives in the West Wing: Alison Mitchell, NYT, Nov. 20, 1995.

  open letter: Marian Wright Edelman, WP, Nov. 3, 1995.

  encyclopedia entry: DeParle, NYTM, Dec. 17, 1995.

  Primus revived: Interview with Wendell Primus. The study appears in 104th Cong., 1st sess., Cong. Rec., 141 (Nov. 1, 1995
): S 16466.

  “Clinton’s tendency”: Interview with Donna Shalala.

  145 “right kind” of reform: Clinton radio address, Sept. 16, 1995, PPP-1995, vol. 2, 1366.“stick of dynamite”: Interview with Wendell Primus.

  nonexistent study: Elizabeth Shogren, Los Angeles Times, Oct. 27, 1995; also interviews with Wendell Primus, Bruce Reed, Donna Shalala, and Melissa Skolfield.

  “may have to accept”: Mike McCurry, White House briefing, Nov. 9, 1995.

  146 “This is petty”: David Maraniss and Michael Weisskopf, “Tell Newt to Shut Up!” (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 152.job-approval rating: George Hager and Eric Pianin, Mirage: Why Neither Democrats Nor Republicans Can Balance the Budget, End the Deficit, and Satisfy the Public (New York: Times Books, 1997), 269.

  Gingrich sobbed: Maraniss and Weisskopf, “Tell Newt to Shut Up!” 1.

  147 “I’ve got a problem,” Leave It to Beaver: Ibid., 182, 190.Clinton had a problem: Trent Lott, the second-ranking Senate Republican, sent around a bulletin asking, “Why take BC off the welfare hook?” (FaxNet, Feb. 1, 1996), and the Republican National Committee began airing ads attacking Clinton’s failure to end welfare.

  147 “All of us are here”: Ron Haskins, “A Potential Welfare Reform Agenda for the Second Session” (background paper for GOP members of the Ways and Means welfare subcommittee), Feb. 26, 1996, 1, 3. Ari Fleischer also worked to jump-start a bill, as did Mickey Kaus, who met with potential funders in the hopes of starting a nonprofit group to lobby for welfare legislation. Instead, he took on an informal role of ferrying messages between Haskins and Bruce Reed and working the press.“politics were quite ravishing”: Interview with Clay Shaw.